Fools, FEAST OF. The Romans kept the festival of Saturn, in December, as a time of general license and revelry. During the brief season of the Saturnalia (q.v.) the slave reclined on his master's seat at table, the master waited upon his slave, and society for the moment seemed to be turned upside down. The grotesque masquerade survived the pagan creed which gave it birth, and not only kept its place among the Christians, but, in the face of solemn anathemas from fathers and councils, found its way into the ceremonial of the Christian church. It was called, at different times and places, by many different names, but latterly came to be best known as the Feast of Fools (Festum Fatuorum, Festum Stultorum). The rites practised varied greatly, but were everywhere marked by the same spirit of broad, boisterous drollery, and coarse but not ill-natured caricature. The donkey played such a frequent part in it that the pageant was often called the Feast of Asses (Festum Astinorum). In some places the ass of Balaam was figured; in others, the ass which stood beside the manger in which the infant Saviour was laid; elsewhere, the ass on which the Virgin and Child fled to Egypt, or the ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem. In every instance there was more or less attempt at dramatic representation, the theatre being generally the chief church of the place, and the words and action of the drama being often ordered by its book of ceremonies. Several rituals of this sort are still preserved: that which was in use at Beauvais, in France, has a rubric ordering the priest when he dismisses the congregation to bray three times, and ordering the people to bray three times in answer. As the ass was led towards the altar he was greeted with a hymn. Where the ass did not come upon the stage the chief point of the farce lay in the election of a mock pope, patriarch, cardinal, archbishop, bishop, or abbot. These mimic dignitaries took such titles as 'Pope of Fools,' 'Archbishop of Dolts,' 'Cardinal of Numskulls,' 'Boy Bishop' (q.v.), 'Patriarch of Sots,' 'Abbot of Unreason,' and the like. On the day of their election they often took possession of the churches, and even occasionally travestied the performance of the church's highest office, the mass, in the church's holiest place, the altar. In some convents the nuns disguised themselves in men's clothes, chanted mock services, and elected a 'little abbess,' who for that day took the place of the real abbess.
The Feast of Fools maintained itself in many places till the Reformation in the 16th century. At Antibes, in the south of France, it survived till the year 1644, when we have it described by an eye-witness in a letter to the philosopher Gassendi. The scene was, as usual, a church; and the actors, dressing themselves in priests' robes turned inside out, read prayers from books turned upside down, through spectacles of orange-peel, using coal or flour for incense, amid a babblement of confused cries, and the mimic bellowings of cattle, and grunting of pigs. See Tillot, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de la Fête des Fous (Lausanne, 1741), and Schneegans in Müller's Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturgeschichte (1858).